


I Am Destruction, Decay, And Desire

by Haberdasher



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst and Tragedy, Body Horror, Burns, Canon-Typical Violence, Crying, Dark, Desolation Avatar Martin Blackwood, Fire, Gen, Graphic Description, Heavy Angst, Horror, Martin Blackwood Needs a Hug, Men Crying, POV Martin Blackwood, Pain, References to the Beatles, Sad Ending, Trans Martin Blackwood, Unhappy Ending, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:15:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23763703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: Martin finds out that Jon’s going to meet with Jude Perry and acts to intervene. It goes... poorly.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Jonathan Sims
Comments: 24
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> M rating for graphic depictions of violence/body horror.

Martin missed Jon.

That was what it all boiled down to, really. He could tell himself he wanted to clear Jon’s name, or that he just wanted the Archives to return to some slight semblance of normalcy, but deep down, what got Martin on the lookout for ways to reconnect with Jon was just... wanting to see him again, to talk to him again, to be with him again.

(Well, not “be with him” like _that._

For one thing, “again” would imply that it had happened before, and Martin wasn’t even sure that Jon considered him a _friend_ , let alone... anything else.

For another, he... well, he’d like that, but he was trying not to get his hopes up.

Besides, Martin’s priorities were get Jon off the hook for murder first, deal with his love life or lack thereof after.)

Martin found the opportunity he’d been looking for in a conversation with Melanie. It seemed like a normal enough conversation on the surface, just asking how you’d go about tracking down something or someone that might be in one of the statements (answer: with great difficulty, as Martin knew well from experience), but after it ended, Martin kept replaying it in his mind, and he noticed something.

When he’d asked Melanie if the person she was looking for, Jude Perry, had given a statement, he’d expected a simple yes or no answer: yes, her statement already exists, or no, she was featured in someone else’s statement if at all.

The answer he had actually _gotten_ was a “Not yet.”

Which meant that this Jude Perry didn’t have a statement on file yet, but that, given the phrasing, there was reason to believe she would soon.

Which meant either that Melanie had some way of knowing that this Jude Perry was heading to the Institute without having any of her contact information, which seemed unlikely, or...

Or that Jon was going to try to get a statement from her in person.

(Which meant in turn that Jon had needed a contact within the Institute in the hopes of getting Ms. Perry’s information, and he’d chosen Melanie. Not Martin, not even Tim, but the new girl who Jon had only met a handful of times before, and Martin was pretty sure every one of them had ended poorly. Sure, there was a logic of sorts in that Melanie was less likely to be seen by the police as a potential accomplice, and was thus safer to contact without fear of being caught, but that didn’t mean it didn’t sting to have Jon place Melanie in such a position of trust and not him.)

He probably should have called up Basira and let her take care of it--she _had_ just asked Martin to let her know if he had any information about where Jon was, after all--but... well, Martin was less than comfortable leaving the safety and well-being of Jonathan Sims, who was currently wanted for murder (rightly or wrongly), up to the care of the police, even if Basira’s voice had seemed to contain a measure of concern as well as suspicion when last they spoke.

Instead, Martin did his own research on one Jude Perry. Figured out where she lived, the general area in which she was likely to be spotted. Without asking Melanie and inviting a confrontation he’d much rather avoid, Martin couldn’t know exactly when and where Jon was likely to confront her, but after a long day of research, he’d managed to narrow possibilities down substantially.

All that remained was scoping the neighborhood out and hoping that he managed to catch Jon as he did so, hopefully before Jon did anything too reckless. Martin told himself that technically, it was related to his research, so it sort of counted as work for the Institute, but really, it was essentially a days-long vacation spent stalking one area of London rather than actually relaxing.

The first day, he found... nothing. Absolutely nothing. No sign of Jon, no sign of Jude Perry (he’d found a few photos of her for reference, though they didn’t seem to match up with one another as well as might be expected), no sign of anything even remotely useful. The day had been wasted, it seemed.

The second day, Martin saw a woman who might have been Jude Perry a few times out of the corner of his eye, but every time he tried to get closer, to investigate further, she’d disappear without a trace, at least as far as he could tell. No sign of Jon at all that day, either.

It was on the third day that things came to a head.

Martin was sitting outside a cafe, enjoying the meager shade provided by one of the cafe’s umbrellas as he nursed a tea, when he spotted Jude Perry once again. This time it wasn’t a maybe sighting, a sighting out of the corner of his eye, fleeting and uncertain, either. It was her, the woman he’d seen in the photographs, heading down the street towards him, unhurried and seemingly carefree.

Martin gripped the table and prepared to get up, see if he could follow her without being spotted, but instead of passing by and continuing her stroll, Jude Perry slid into the seat across from him.

Martin could feel his heartbeat pick up speed as he looked at her, wondering what she was doing, how much she knew, how deep in all this she was. At best, Jude Perry was an acquaintance of somebody who’d been traumatized by eldritch horrors. At worst, Jude Perry _was_ one of those eldritch horrors.

And, between Jon wanting to meet her badly enough to enlist Melanie’s help and the way she’d calmly sat down beside him and the strange glint in her eyes, Martin was pretty sure he wasn’t dealing with a best case scenario here.

“Can I help you?” Martin said, trying his best to keep his voice level.

“Maybe. Are you stalking me?”

Martin panicked a little at that. Maybe he should have expected it, he knew well enough that he wasn’t the stealthiest person, but still, he felt his hand wrap around the cool metal of the cafe table, the flesh of his palm sinking in where the metal was criss-crossed with holes.

Jude smirked. “Looks like a yes. Care to share why?”

“I- no, I’m not stalking you, I-” God, he was stammering, he sounded even more nervous than he felt, he probably seemed like- like a flustered idiot who really _was_ stalking this woman, even though he still barely knew who she was. “I’m actually looking for a friend of mine.”

“Am I your friend, then?”

Martin couldn’t quite read the look in her eyes, wasn’t quite sure what the correct response was. Say yes, and risk being accused of being too familiar with a stranger he’d been stalking? Say no, and risk being accused of dismissing her as a potential friend too easily?

Martin went for a third option.

“Well, uh, his name’s Jonathan Sims, actually, he-”

“Oh, you know the _Archivist_.”

And Martin’s heart sank, because his suspicions were confirmed there; he knew well enough at this point that anyone and any _thing_ referring to Jon as the Archivist was definitely some variety of bad news, even if the details remained murky.

Jude Perry leaned towards Martin, and he could feel her breath, hot and dry, against his arms, which were still pressed tightly against the table.

“Archivist got one of his little Eyes to spy on me ahead of time? I should have figured.”

“Er-” Martin wasn’t entirely sure what Jude meant by “one of his little eyes,” but he caught enough of the gist to explain himself just the same. “No, Jon didn’t put me up to this--he doesn’t even know I’m here.”

“ _Really_.” Jude leaned back in her chair again, far enough that Martin was half-convinced the chair was going to tip backwards at any moment.

That one word from Jude, and the gleam in her eyes as she said it, was enough to make Martin realize he’d made a terrible mistake. Letting somebody who’s probably a bad guy know you came alone, and nobody else knows you’re there? Yeah, that was a good way to get yourself killed, in books and movies and probably real life now too. (Though usually that particular trope seemed to involve some secret, some information that couldn’t quite be passed on to the main characters in time, and Martin still had only the faintest idea what he was even doing here, so maybe he stood a chance of leaving this meeting alive after all...)

“Though I think he was looking for you?” Martin rushed to add. “I really am here to meet him rather than you, I swear. He’s- I don’t know how much you know, but he’s been going through a lot- we all have, really... I just wanted to see him, that’s all.”

And now he was babbling to the stranger who was probably something out of a horror story in disguise. Brilliant. Though telling this Jude that the archives staff were having a rough time right about now was pretty far from sharing a secret still.

Jude tapped her finger on the table, and something about it didn’t sound right. It wasn’t the sound of nail or flesh rapping against metal, but something softer, with what almost sounded like... squelching?

Martin looked out at the street around them, briefly, just to confirm that it was still as bustling as ever, that it hadn’t suddenly become conveniently vacated just in time for Jude to do something terrible, but no, it was as busy as always. Not that being in public would save him, necessarily, but maybe she’d hold back when they were still surrounded by witnesses.

“You remind me a little of myself, you know.” Jude said after a long moment of silence.

“Really?” Martin’s voice came out higher and more uncertain than he would have liked.

“You’re like I used to be, anyway. With a tough job, stuck in the rat race, running and running and getting nothing but exhaustion from it... burning the candle at all ends, burning yourself out because you don’t know what else to use as fuel... that sound about right?”

It did, actually. It really did. Martin was reluctant to actually say as much out loud, had a niggling feeling that doing so wouldn’t lead to anything good, but Jude’s description sounded awfully like things had been ever since Prentiss, if not before. Struggling to keep up with the chaos around him. Watching the world he thought he knew break down while he was busy getting everybody else tea. Run ragged and still pushing himself further, further, further...

How much of him being here was genuinely from wanting to see Jon, and how much was out of a bizarre feeling of obligation, of having to push himself that one step further once he knew he could, even though this was definitely not in the job description?

Even though Martin hadn’t said anything, his expression must have shown his agreement, because Jude smiled at him--not the smirk she’d worn before, but what looked to be a genuine, albeit thin, smile. “I could tell you how I solved that problem. Show you, even. Not sure it’d work quite the same for you, though.”

Martin was pretty sure by now that Jude’s solution there was some variation on becoming an eldritch monstrosity, and no, that wasn’t a solution he was terribly open to trying personally, thanks, and he was trying to think of a way to politely decline and remove himself from the conversation still intact when-

Was that Jon?

Martin looked more closely, noticing that Jude’s gaze was following his own, and yes, he was still about a block away and didn’t seem to have recognized either him or Jude, but that was definitely Jon back there. So he hadn’t been wrong about staking out the neighborhood being a good way to meet him, it seemed.

“The Archivist, I assume?” Jude made a show of wrinkling her nose. “Awfully scrawny, isn’t he?”

Jude’s words barely registered as Martin tried to take in every detail he could make out about Jon’s appearance. He looked tired, the bags under his eyes visible even at this distance, but that wasn’t new, not really. What was new was the fluffy magenta jacket he was wearing; Martin was very sure he hadn’t seen Jon with that on before. (Martin himself hadn’t bothered with a jacket, but then, he never did mind the cold that much; Jude didn’t have one either, for that matter, and she was wearing a tank top, which seemed a bit much given that proper summer was still at least a month away.)

Jon was definitely heading their way, but Martin couldn’t tell if that was because he’d noticed one or both of them, or because he’d been planning to meet Jude here anyway, or because he just happened to be walking past this cafe as part of some grand cosmic coincidence.

“Oh, you should introduce us! Though... I never really introduced myself to you, did I? Just assumed you _knew_ , your lot usually do...” Jude leaned towards Martin--that unpleasant squelching sound came again, louder than before, as her back parted with the back of the chair--and extended her right hand. “Jude Perry, pleasure to meet you.”

“M-Martin Blackwood, and likewise.” Martin looked at Jude’s hand for a long moment, trying to figure out whether to extend his own, or whether this was some strange sort of trap.

On the one hand, she had seemed a bit overeager to suggest Martin introducing her to Jon, and Martin was pretty sure she was trying to stifle a grin of some sort. On the other hand, Sasha had shaken hands with that Michael a while back, and to hear her tell it the experience had been unpleasant but relatively forgettable, and refusing to shake Jude’s hand could come off as an insult, could lead to her carrying a grudge that couldn’t be shaken as easily.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t...

After some contemplation, Martin took a deep breath and reached out, extending his hand until it met Jude’s own.

The moment his hand first brushed against Jude’s, feeling not the strong grip he expected but something soft and painfully hot, Martin knew that he had made a terrible mistake.

It wasn’t one he could take back, though; Jude’s grip was strong enough to ensure that much, at least. His hand sank into Jude’s slightly, and as he was still processing how much that hurt, the searing pain of his own skin submerged in what felt like molten candle wax, she pressed the flesh ( _was_ it flesh? it felt too malleable, too yielding, and above all much too hot) of her arm against his.

The world seemed to go into slow motion, almost, as the agonizing, searing pain of the burn traveled up Martin’s arm and the heat of Jude’s touch seeped into the rest of his body, which, well, Martin was pretty sure that wasn’t how burns worked normally, but normal didn’t exactly apply here, did it...

Martin screamed. He wasn’t proud of it, but he screamed as loudly as he could manage, not because he really expected that it would change anything but because it was about all he could do, as even when he finally pulled away from Jude’s grasp his flesh was still burning worse than ever.

Jude stopped hiding the wicked grin that she’d been trying to suppress earlier, and she said something to him, but Martin couldn’t hear her words over his own screaming and the sound of his flesh sizzling all around him.

Martin hadn’t been conscious of inhaling until he picked up the smell that came with the inward breath. There was smoke, clearly, a scent like that of matches and incense, but something else, too--cooking meat, like a barbecue, and Martin was all too aware that it was his body, his meat, the flesh that made him up cooking as it prepared to go up in smoke.

Jon was running towards the two of them, and his mouth was open, either in speech or in a wordless scream like Martin’s own, but he might as well have been silent for all Martin could hear.

Small patches of his body abruptly stopped hurting, and while Martin would have liked to take that as a good sign he knew better, knew that either his nerves had been burned out or he had lost those parts of his body entirely to the fire. The gentle breeze that Martin had barely noticed before felt like the gusts of a tornado against his body, and Martin was half-convinced that it was tearing off chunks of his skin with every blast. Martin tried not to look too closely at himself, but even without looking closely he could see that his flesh was warping, bubbling before his very eyes.

There was no light to the flame. (Wasn’t that something from one of the statements, the lightless flame? Some burn victim in a hospital mentioning it? Lucky sod, making it to a hospital...) Martin wasn’t sure if that made things better or worse, to have his vision remain more or less intact as his body fell apart around him, to see Jude Perry’s grinning face and Jon’s anguished one all too clearly as the fire within consumed him.

It occurred to Martin suddenly that he was dying, that this was likely to be the last scene he would ever see.

Martin didn’t want to die, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that he was dying, a fact that seemed to loom over him once he had realized it. Most people who died didn’t want it, after all. That wouldn’t save him.

Martin hated the idea that he would end up a footnote in somebody else’s story. That he would be dead, and everybody would forget about him soon enough, and life would go on as if nothing had changed.

More than that, though, Martin hated the idea that the last thing he would see was Jon despairing as he watched Martin burn alive. He would do anything, _anything_ to wipe the despair off of Jon’s face, to be by his side again, to make things right between them.

(A little voice in the back of his head said: _Anything? Even bringing others that same despair?_

And Martin recoiled against the thought, his first instinct being that no, obviously other people’s pain matters too, he doesn’t want _anybody_ to hurt like that, but-

How honest was that, _really_?

There were people he cared about, who he made small talk with and whose hobbies and birthdays he tried to remember, and people he Cared about, whose pain cut him to the core even more than his own. (And the ones he Cared about didn’t always Care, or even lowercase care, about Martin in turn, and Martin knew that, he did, and knowing it changed nothing, deep down.)

And then there was the rest of the world, people who were merely abstractions to him, who definitely existed but didn’t really matter to him, any care he had for them being extrapolated from what he felt towards the few he held close.

A world without suffering, without pain, would be wonderful, but Martin knew well enough that it would never happen, and he knew too that if it came down to seeing Jon hurt or seeing a stranger hurt, he’d pick the latter any day.

 _Anything_ , Martin reaffirmed.)

And then all at once those bits and pieces of Martin that weren’t hurting consumed his entire body, though he could still feel the heat clearly, feel the fire burning within him.

The breeze felt like a breeze again, not a tornado pressing against his skin, and while that skin looked a bit odd it wasn’t bubbling as he looked down at it, and-

And Martin was still here. He had burned alive, and now he was just sitting at that cafe table with Jude again, almost as if none of it had ever happened.

Almost.

But the fire that raged within him still, the hot energy that pulsed through his entire body, made it clear that something deep within him had, indeed, changed.

Jon’s expression was almost unchanged, but Jude’s grin grew even wider as she raised an eyebrow and said, “Huh. Didn’t think you had it in you.”


	2. Chapter 2

Martin wasn’t quite sure where to focus his attention: on Jude, who had just addressed him directly, her eyebrows raised as she continued to grin, or on Jon, whose face was still filled with horror, as if he were still watching Martin burn alive.

Martin paused to consider the heat that now coursed through him--not the tepid warmth of body heat, but something much stronger, a fire raging beneath his skin--and wondered how close to the mark that really was.

He wasn’t dead, though. He was still here, still present in this world, burning or no burning. Wasn’t that what should matter most?

Martin focused his gaze on Jon, but he knew he was leaving the conversation open to both parties when he said, “What the hell was _that_?”

(If anything, the words were probably geared more towards Jude, but the fact that he was saying them in the first place was making a statement in and of itself: Hey, not dead here, you can stop looking so glum any time now, Jon, it’s not like _you_ were the one who just got burned alive!)

“Something most people don’t survive.” Jude responded. “I guess you’re just special.”

“...I suppose so.” Martin gulped nervously, noticing as he did that his throat felt like it was made of sandpaper and ash.

“And now you’re halfway to my ‘solution’, without me telling you the whole story first. Real time-saver right there.”

“They, uh, they do say ‘show, don’t tell’...”

Martin’s voice trailed off as he realized that he had managed to get drawn into a conversation with the woman who had- had tried to kill him just now, and even if it didn’t quite take that didn’t really make the attempt itself any more forgivable, and meanwhile Jon was still just standing there, silent, his wide eyes filled with horror...

Martin hadn’t seen Jon looked quite so freaked out since... well, since Prentiss happened to the Archives, with them both inside.

Oh God, did he think Martin was like _Prentiss_ now?

Martin turned his whole body towards Jon before speaking, hoping to make it clear who his intended audience was. “So, we’ve established I survived... _that_ , so you can stop staring at me like I’m going to keel over or something any second now.”

Jon blinked a few times before saying, “I wasn’t _staring_.”

Martin tried and mostly succeeded in suppressing his laughter, but before he could decide on how to word his response, Jude Perry chimed in. “You totally were. Not that I expected anything different myself.”

Martin briefly considered thanking Jude for backing him up on this one before thinking better of it and remaining silent.

“...alright, maybe I _was_ staring, but can you blame me? It’s not every day you see someone you know burn from head to toe and then get back up again after!”

Only then did Martin consider how strange it all must have looked from the outside, seen with a clarity that Martin himself was sorely lacking at the time, too overcome with pain and lightless flame to take in much else.

Martin glanced down at his arm and noticed that it didn’t _look_ burned--not that he even knew what a burn of that magnitude normally looked like, but his arm looked, well, almost normal. Almost. The flesh of his arm hadn’t sunk quite that far into the holes between the metal of the table before, though.

Also, the tea he’d been nursing for well over an hour was visibly steaming, though Martin had no intention of touching it again regardless of its current temperature.

Martin could see Jon noticing many of the same things he was now and using that evidence to reach all the wrong conclusions.

“Look, Jon, it’s still me, alright? Maybe some things changed just now-” Jude let out an audible snort of amusement, and Martin did his best to ignore it. “-but I’m still the same- the same incompetent idiot you know, not some, some monster. I’m not going to hurt you, Jon.”

Martin stood up, one hand reaching towards Jon even though he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it from there; mostly he was just watching to see if Jon flinched, if Jon recoiled, if Jon saw him as a threat rather than a friend.

Before Martin could get too close, though, Jude spoke up again. “Careful now, I wouldn’t touch him unless you _want_ him to be like us--and I’m not sure that’d even work on him, though I’m not opposed to finding out the hard way.”

There was a lot going on in that sentence, but Martin’s attention was focused on one word of it, a word he echoed numbly as he pondered its implications. “ _Us_.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t figured that out yet! We’re both servants of the Desolation now. Only way to survive burning like that.”

Martin slowly let his hand drop back down to his side, trying not to look too closely at the expression on Jon’s face as he did so. “No, you’re- you’re lying.”

“I think you know better than that. Go on, tell me you don’t feel it. Just tell me you don’t feel the burning, the fire within you practically begging to be unleashed.”

Martin hesitated for long enough that his hesitation itself became enough of a response, and Jude Perry just laughed and laughed.

Jon, however, responded in a fashion that involved using actual words, though it took him a long moment after training his eyes on Martin before those words actually emerged. “...how does it feel?”

Martin wasn’t sure how much he really wanted to share, whether keeping Jon in the loop was worth potentially losing his trust in the process, but the words spilled out of him just the same.

“It’s like the heat from before never really went away, like it just stopped hurting all of the sudden but it’s still there deep down, still ready to ignite any second now--but also like it’s part of me, that the heat _is_ me somehow, and I just _know_ it’s not going to turn on me like that again.”

Jude slammed her hand onto the table, which might have been a more effective gesture if the sound that it caused was more of a loud bang and less of an awkward squelch. “Don’t do that!”

“Do _what_?” Martin said. “Ask me things?”

“Yes! It’s awfully rude, at least in my book.”

“I mean, it _is_ my job.” Jon protested.

“Well, who asked you to-”

Martin suddenly heard police sirens ringing out in the distance, and he evidently wasn’t the only one, as Jude stood up abruptly and Jon’s eyes managed to grow even wider.

“Suppose that’s what I get for giving you time to scream.” Jude said with a pointed look at Martin. “Another time, maybe.”

“Tomorrow.” Martin replied, trying to sound more authoritative and confident than he felt. “We’re discussing things here this time tomorrow.” Martin glanced at his wrist, since he’d long since lost track of what time it was; he was half-expecting his wristwatch to be burned to a crisp, but it was still there, still intact, practically untouched.

“We?” Jon asked.

“Yes, _we._ ” Martin put his hands on his hips. “You’re coming back too.”

“Ordering people around already? You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Martin Blackwood?”

“I...”

And with that, Jude Perry ran off until she mingled with the crowd that surrounded them.

“Jon?”

“I’d better get moving.” Jon started walking away briskly, but not so fast that Martin couldn’t keep up with him with a little effort.

“Jon, we- we need to talk, don’t just run away from me the first chance you get-”

“Did you forget that that the police are on their way, or that I’m currently wanted for murder?” Jon said in something between a whisper and a hiss, hopefully quiet enough that nobody nearby would overhear.

“Did you forget that you just watched me get murdered?” Martin wasn’t quite as careful about the volume of his voice, and he winced a little thinking of what any passersby must think of such a statement, though nobody reacted to it as far as he could tell--in fact, when Martin looked around, those near them on the street seemed to be making an effort _not_ to notice the pair of them.

“...does it still count as murder when you kept going afterwards?”

Martin pressed one hand against his temple as he tried not to sigh, unsure whether he was more uncomfortable with how Jon was apparently seeing what had happened to him as- as a subject for academic debate, of all things, or the awkward way he referred to Martin’s existence afterwards, how he seemed to go out of his way to avoid describing Martin’s current state of being as “living.” “I don’t know, alright? But I hardly think the legal implications are the most important thing right now-”

An ambulance zipped by, though it thankfully didn’t stop upon seeing the two of them, presumably headed to the scene of Martin’s... transformation rather than on the lookout for a still-ambulatory victim.

A hint of a smile, or perhaps a smirk, appeared on Jon’s face as he retorted, “I think the police would disagree on that one.”

“Well, I’m not talking to them, now, am I?”

Jon let out a soft sigh. “Are you going to follow me all the way back to where I’m staying?”

“If that’s what it takes for you to actually give me the time of day here, then yes!”

“Fine. Alright.” Jon slowed to a halt. Martin realized as Jon did so that he wasn’t nearly as certain of where he was now than he had been before accompanying Jon on that impromptu walk, though Martin was pretty sure he could figure it out easily enough. “Say your piece, then.”

Martin opened his mouth, realized he didn’t actually know exactly what he wanted to say just yet, and then closed his mouth again, a long moment passing before he managed to line up his words the way he wanted them.

“Don’t... don’t be weird about this, alright?”

There had to be better words than that, but if they existed they were slipping through Martin’s fingers, or perhaps hiding beyond his grasp, either way unable to be wrangled into submission when he needed them most.

“I just saw you get set on fire right in front of me, probably _because_ of me, and you want me to not ‘be weird about this.’“ Jon said it more as a statement than as a question, though the disbelief still shone through all too clearly.

“Yes! I mean... please?” Martin ran his hand through his hair nervously; was his hair oddly sticky to the touch now, or was that just a combination of his imagination going wild and his hair being covered in almost-summer sweat? “Just... I don’t get all this any more than you do, alright? I get what’s going on here probably _less_ than you do, honestly, even now. Don’t go... I don’t know, thinking I hold the secrets of the universe now, or seeing me as some sort of science project, or, or anything like that. This hasn’t changed anything. I’m still me, Jon.”

“But with the heat of the fire that burned you alive still raging within you.” Jon turned away from Martin, presumably about to walk away again.

“Look, if you think that makes me some kind of monster now, what does that say about _you_?”

Martin regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, even before he watched Jon’s eyes shift from being filled with a soft, wary curiosity to a dark steel.

“I’m leaving. Don’t follow me.” True to his word, Jon began to walk away, his pace even swifter than before.

“Jon- Jon, I didn’t mean it, you’re not a monster- and this isn’t your fault, either, if you really think that-” Martin tried to keep up with Jon, but unlike before, Jon didn’t even turn to look at Martin when he spoke, didn’t slow down even the slightest bit, didn’t acknowledge his presence in the slightest.

“Jon, I’m sorry.” Martin reached out with one hand; he knew Jon didn’t like being touched, sure, but it was at least one surefire way to make him pay attention, maybe make him pause for long enough to actually consider Martin’s words. “Please just listen, I-”

Martin’s hand brushed against Jon’s shoulder, against both the fabric of his fluffy pink jacket (which was every bit as soft as Martin had imagined) and against his bare skin poking out from underneath, and Jon winced and let out a short cry, and-

And Martin put together the pieces a moment too late.

Even as Martin pulled his hand away (with small bits remaining, pale pieces of himself sticking to the bright fur of Jon’s jacket) he could see his handiwork, the price of his touch that Jon would now have to bear. The skin was visibly discolored in a matter of seconds. Martin had wondered, idly, how a bad burn like the one he had received would normally look; well, now he was pretty sure he knew the answer.

Martin couldn’t help but glance between his own hand, which by all rights should be horribly disfigured now but seemed as good as new, and the burn on Jon’s shoulder, which looked almost as bad as Martin’s own burn had felt.

“Jon, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

Jon didn’t say a word as he ran away, ran from Martin and his burning touch, and that in and of itself said far too much.


	3. Chapter 3

The walk home became nothing more than a blur in Martin’s mind the moment it was over, the moment he was able to close and lock the door behind him and take a moment to just breathe. He still didn’t know exactly where he’d been when he’d burned Jon, how exactly he had gotten from here to there, though the pain in his legs and his difficulty in catching his breath suggested that it had been quite the walk.

Martin pressed his back against his door and closed his eyes and fervently hoped that the past couple of hours had all been just a bad dream that he was about to wake up from any second now.

He waited and waited and nothing changed. If this was a dream, it was one he wasn’t waking up from that easily.

Martin slumped down until he was sitting on the floor, back still firmly pressed against his front door, and let out a shaky laugh. Of course it wasn’t that easy. Nothing was _ever_ that easy, not for him at least. And besides, they always said pinching yourself would get you out of a dream, and while he hadn’t tried that exactly, what he’d gone through was much more intense than any mere pinch could ever be...

He hadn’t noticed the tear starting to form until he heard the sizzle of it evaporating and saw the steam rising up from just below his left eye.

And he’d thought he’d been in a sorry state _before_ all this...

Well.

Deep breath in, deep breath out.

This was far from the first time Martin had had a bad day. Admittedly, today was--Martin let out a laugh, sharp and bitter and raucous--today was exceptionally bad even for a life where other bad days included “being trapped in my flat by a worm monster (thirteen times in a row),” “being chased through my workplace by the same worm monster before stumbling on a dead body,” “being accused of being a murderer by my boss,” and “getting trapped in endless corridors by a monster with giant hands before finding another dead body, this one in my boss’ office,” but it was still just another bad day, and he’d handled bad days before.

Deep breath in, deep breath out.

Martin wiped away what remained of his tear, which was now just a thin layer of salt on his cheek, and tried not to think too hard about his skin felt oddly sticky to the touch.

He had a routine for this, plans for what to do when a day had been capital-b Bad, and they weren’t perfect, no, but they usually helped some at least, were certainly better than flailing around doing nothing in particular.

Maybe if he took a nice long bath, turned some calming music on and lit up a scented candle and tried to relax, things wouldn’t seem quite as horrible once he was done.

Maybe.

It was worth a shot, at any rate.

Martin started with the radio. It was an old-fashioned radio, one he’d bought on a whim some years back, and yes, there were other ways to listen to music, ways with less commercials and more music he knew he’d like, but he liked his radio just the same. In a way, it always made it feel that much more special when a song that he really liked came on, because he knew it wasn’t his doing, that it came down to the whims of some DJ he’d likely never meet. He almost always listened to the same station, an oldies station he’d been fond of from as far back as he could remember, and now didn’t seem like a time to mess with what worked.

A few button presses and the music started playing, the sound of the radio quickly filling Martin’s flat.

“ _Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away_...”

Martin let out a half-stifled snort as he heard what the radio had on now. He’d been hoping for something a little more upbeat, but admittedly, the song didn’t _not_ fit his current situation.

Yesterday, Martin’s biggest concern had been what Jon was up to and trying to clear him of that murder charge that he knew wasn’t Jon’s doing. Yesterday, Martin’s greatest encounter with the supernatural had probably been being trapped by Prentiss for nearly a fortnight, and he’d managed to get out of that without so much as a scratch.

“ _Now it looks as though they’re here to stay_...”

That was probably just beginner’s luck, though, or something like it, and clearly, whatever luck Martin had had in regards to the supernatural had run out.

Martin shook his head in an attempt to clear his thoughts. He was not going to think about what had happened. The whole point was that he was going to take a moment to calm down and relax and _not_ dwell on it.

“ _Oh, I believe in yesterday_...” 

So, radio was on, first step of the process successfully completed. Music: check.

Next up: the scented candle.

Martin had been a fan of scented candles since before he could really afford to be, when he’d stuck a small one he’d found at a thrift store in his handbag and left it there for months at a time, until he could swear he caught the scent of peppermint as soon as he opened the bag. Now he bought the full-sized ones from time to time, whenever he happened to catch a scent that he liked going on sale, saving them up for days that he needed a little pick-me-up in the evening.

This was certainly one of those days, and Martin didn’t hesitate, heading over to his closet and rummaging around a bit until he found a purple candle that apparently smelled like “love spell.” Martin didn’t have a clue what love spells were supposed to smell like, but he trusted his past self’s judgment in buying it, and it did sound like a pleasant enough name for a scent, if a bit on the abstract side.

Now, where was his lighter?

“ _Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be_...”

As Martin held the candle in his hand, trying to remember where he’d stashed his lighter when he’d last used it and only half taking in the music from the radio, a thought occurred to him: perhaps he didn’t _need_ a lighter.

Whatever he was now, it had to do with fire, right? With burning things? (Things like his own body--no, no, _not_ thinking about that, especially when even that much consideration given to it was enough to make Martin wince.) Maybe he could make it work to his advantage. If he was going to be some sort of supernatural monster now, the least the universe could do for him was let him light his own candles.

Martin opened the lid of the candle--it smelled surprisingly fruity, with a slight hint of vanilla--and focused on the wick very intently, on urging it to begin burning.

The candle didn’t light up.

Well, maybe he just needed to get a bit more hands-on with things...

“ _There’s a shadow hangin’ over me_...”

Martin stuck his pointer finger in the candle jar and concentrated on making his finger really warm, and thus the wick his finger was brushing against by proxy.

For a moment, nothing visible happened, and Martin felt a bit silly, standing there with part of his hand inside a candle jar because he couldn’t be bothered to go look for a lighter-

And then, suddenly, the candle burst into flame, flame that didn’t hurt his finger in the slightest when he brushed against it.

As he repositioned his finger, though, it touched the body of the candle wax, and it came back out with a bit of purple stuck to it, and the candle smelled partially of the fruity scent that some candle company thought was what “love spell” smelled like, yes, but also disquietingly like burning flesh.

The patch of purple on his finger wouldn’t come off no matter how many times he tried to scrub it off.

“ _Oh, yesterday came suddenly_...”

Fine. That was... that was _fine_. That was what the last part of the equation was for, after all. Maybe he couldn’t get that bit of candle wax off by hand, but a bath should sort that out nicely, and perhaps help calm him down more to boot.

Martin undressed, leaving his clothes in a neat pile next to the bathtub, then entered the tub and turned the water on.

The water turned to steam as it hit his body, and between the roar of the faucet and the hiss of the steam erupting from him, he could barely make out the radio in the background, though he knew the words well enough. ( _Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say_... _I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday_...)

Martin let out a slightly-hysterical laugh as the water kept flowing and turning to steam and evaporating, as the room proceeded to get more and more humid while the bathtub refused to fill.

Of course. Of _course_. He couldn’t even have a nice soothing bath anymore, now, could he? How dare he try to do something normal, something that might make him _happy_...

No, wait, maybe he could figure this out.

Martin took a deep breath and let it out slowly before turning the faucet back off. (The radio came warbling back as soon as the water stopped flowing: _Now I need a place to hide away... Oh, I believe in yesterday_...)

Then he turned it back on, but with the water set to come out as cold as the faucet would allow.

The faucet still burbled away loudly enough to drown out the radio, but while the steam still rose up, it came more slowly than before, slowly enough that eventually the bathtub began to fill up with water that hadn’t warmed enough to evaporate just yet.

Martin made up for the lesser amount of steam, however, by bursting into sobs with a violence that surprised even himself, hot tears disappearing as soon as they began to fall.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, consider following me on tumblr at [haberdashing](https://haberdashing.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
